The Other Ending
by Kali Ravel
Summary: A short story set after the ending of SO3 - one of the paired endings that we didn't get to see. Maria x Luther.
1. Chapter 1

"Hi."

It was difficult to recognise him, covered in bandages as he was. She wasn't even sure if he was awake. But then, he turned, and saw her. He groaned.

"You?"

Well, he wasn't screaming for the guards. That was a start.

"Yes, it's me."

She thought about sitting down on the edge of his bed, but decided that might be a little much.

"Guards!" He tried to sit up, but only succeeded in raising himself an inch or so, trussed down as he was.

"I'll be back," she said, as she left through the window as quickly as she'd entered.


	2. Chapter 2

He didn't scream this time.

"They didn't believe me," he told her. "Most of them don't believe you ever managed to leave the Eternal Sphere in the first place. And those who do know that we destroyed the Eternal Sphere."

She stayed silent. He tried sitting up again, giving up quickly.

"We _did_ destroy the Eternal Sphere. How di-"

"You didn't destroy us," she said, sitting down on the end of his bed, gingerly. "We weren't yours to destroy."

"But we created you! How can you still exist when we've removed the Eternal Sphere from existence? We deleted all the data we held and destroyed or reprogrammed most of the machines! How can you exist? You're just data, and data that doesn't exist any more at that!"

She waited for him to stop speaking.

"I told you; we weren't yours to destroy. The Eternal Sphere wasn't just a program. It might have started out that way, but we developed our own minds, our own thoughts and feelings and perceptions. And you couldn't destroy those. All you managed to do was cut our dimension away from yours."

"So how did you get here?!"

"Later," she replied, checking her watch. "The nurse will be here with your pills soon."


	3. Chapter 3

This time, she met him in the daytime, in the 'garden'.

It wasn't a real garden, not like the kind she'd seen on Elicoor II or anywhere else she'd been. It was like the kind they'd had on earth – virtual.

"I've never seen real grass," he told her. He seemed melancholy. "There are pictures of it in the archives, but I've never seen it. I've never seen any of the animals we used to have. I've never even touched earth."

"You haven't?"

"How could I?"

"Remember, I'm not from here. I know nothing about your history."

"Of course."

They were silent for a moment. Then he started to talk again.

"For as long as I've known, we've lived in cities like Arkives. Suspended in the air, hundreds of miles above the earth. Everything is clean and sterile. I've never seen a plant, or an animal, beyond the cyber-pets and gardens that we create. I've never seen another species or another race apart from my own. I've never swam in a lake or an ocean, or even a pool. Why do that when we can simulate it? Why waste the space for a swimming pool when we have to build upwards as it is because we've run out of space on what we still call the ground? I've never run except on a treadmill. All my exercise comes from testing out the new features of the Eternal Sphere."

He laughed.

"_Came_, I mean. I need a new project. I think too much without a distraction."

"Me too."

And he had given her a lot to think about. But, again, she had to leave before the nurses came to take him back inside. His daily walks were meant to be part of his therapy, but it seemed they annoyed him as much as anything they did there.


	4. Chapter 4

"Is that why you created the Eternal Sphere?"

"What?"

"Because you wanted to see the things you never could here. You wanted other worlds, and other species, and impossible experiences."

He glared at her.

"I've been reading up on your history. My administrator privileges were never revoked."

"I'll have to fix that."

"You never got off this planet, did you? I read about it. This planet became worse and worse, and you never managed to leave it. You were always waiting. And then war destroyed most of the population – and that was a _good_ thing, because you didn't have enough space for all the people who lived then."

"I wasn't alive then," he interjected, but she ignored him.

"So, you've created this safe, sterile place. Carefully controlled population sizes. You only have a sister because your parents were rich enough to bypass the Breeding Laws."

"She only has a brother, you mean. Blair's the elder."

"She is," she agreed. She looked at him. "You shouldn't really exist."

"Nor should you."

"I'm glad that you do."


	5. Chapter 5

"Why are you here?"

"I wanted to see you."

"I meant why are you _here_, in our world, not why are you here in my hospital room."

She sat down on the edge of the bed again. "After the split…" she began. "Well, most of Quark disbanded. I left. I couldn't see the point in what we were doing any more. I didn't have a mission any more. I've spent a third of my life searching for Professor Leingod, to ask him why he made me this way, and that purpose was suddenly gone. So," and she smiled at him, "I came here to ask you. Why you made me this way."

"I looked you up, before you came here, that first time." He grimaced. "Before you broke every bone in my body,"

She started to respond, but he waved one of his casts at her and she stopped. "I didn't create you. No one did. You were part of the AI. We created it to be self-replicating, and to learn, so that players wouldn't be faced with the same people, for years on end, repeating the same thing. We set the parameters – I can measure your chances of getting sick, your chance of falling in 'love' with any given person, what height you'll grow to…but there's always a certain random factor, to make it unpredictable." He laughed, and it was not a cheerful sound. "We thought that would make it more fun."

Her face was stony. She didn't enjoy hearing herself, her personality, and her life described as a series of easily measurable ones and zeros.

"But no, no one created you as an individual. Or your parents, or the Leingods, or the Esteeds. All of you were born and bred solely within the AI."

"So I'm an original creation of the Eternal Sphere?"

"You could say that. There are some people there who were created and controlled purely by people here. I don't know what would have happened to them after the split. But there was quite an elaborate AI. We wanted it to feel real." He winced. "I think we succeeded."

She reached over, and tugged the pillow beneath him, moving it to a more comfortable position. "Is that better?"

"That's fine." He said, not exactly grateful.

"I tried editing your data, you know."

"What happened?"

"I couldn't. You were flawed, corrupted code. I couldn't edit it or delete it. That's why I used that anti-virus program."

"Anti-virus?" she said, raising her eyebrows. "Do they _usually_ look like enormous angels with great strength that attack you?"

"Only to the viruses."

She pinched him then. He didn't call for the guards.


	6. Chapter 6

It hadn't been easy, surviving in what she still thought of as '4D space'. It hadn't been easy to get into 4D space, come to that. Without Sophia, she couldn't have done it. And she wasn't entirely sure she'd be able to go back. She could exist here, due to her own powers of alteration, but that was probably all she could do.

She'd spent a lot of time in Gemity. As she'd told Luther, her administrator privileges had never been revoked, so travelling and producing ID didn't cause too many problems. What was far more likely was that she'd slip up somehow, and let people know that she was unusual. She hadn't see many cities in 4D space, but from her reading, and from Luther's comments, she suspected they'd all be very similar – so any differences she showed would be even more obvious.

In Gemity, her clothes didn't seem so unusual. She could earn some money from the Arena, using that to book into inns or to buy food. She couldn't sleep outside – there were no homeless people in 4D space, unlike in the Eternal Sphere, and there were precious few dark corners.

Some nights, she couldn't sleep, and she lay awake, wondering if this decision was really as stupid as it seemed. She didn't know if she could go home. But, she did know that she wouldn't have been happy if she hadn't at least tried.

She didn't know what she wanted here, but anything she thought of doing in the Eternal Sphere seemed pointless. The world existed, in a way, because she believed it did – and she suspected that that was why nothing seemed to have any value.

Sometimes, she wondered about what would happen when she died. What happened to 4D beings after death, and what happened to those in the Eternal Sphere?


	7. Chapter 7

His nose itched.

He could have called for the nurse, but her constant babbling chatter irritated him. With the casts still on his arms, he couldn't scratch it himself. There was very little he could do for himself, the state he was in. And even if he could, he'd still be trapped here.

Blair had had him taken here. "For his own good", she'd said. The Apris team had backed her up, and he'd been too injured to have much say in it.

This place marketed itself as being excellent for rest and relaxation. It was state of the art. There were simulations of whatever you might want to look at on each window, and the gardens were some of the highest quality simulations available. He'd designed them, after all.

The nurse came in. He pretended to be asleep.

"Luther? Luther, you're going to have a visitor later."

He didn't move, trying to keep his breathing shallow and slow.

"Your sister's coming to see you. You're going to have a visit from Blair, Luther!"

He knew who his sister was – why did this stupid young nurse feel the need to remind him? And why did she have to sound so perky about it? And when, exactly, had people stopped calling him sir?

Luther waited till the nurse had gone before turning his face to the wall. He wondered where Maria was. He had very little else to think about, trapped here, day after day.


	8. Chapter 8

"She's _here_, Blair."

He didn't know why he was telling her. Maybe he wanted to offer his sister something, some information, and that was all he had. What else was he going to do, tell her about the flowers he'd seen in the 'garden'? It wasn't like they hadn't both seen them millions of times while developing the program.

She ignored him anyway. She didn't even look at him, instead choosing to fiddle with the window settings, to try to find something more pleasing. Nothing pleased him, but it probably made her feel good to try.

Luther sulked. Something about being around Blair made him revert back to childhood.

"I hate you," he tried. She ignored that too.

"I've spoken to the nurses," she said. "Your casts can come off soon, and you can start physiotherapy. Then, maybe you can come back to Sphere."

He wondered why she was giving him permission to run his own company.

"We've scaled down our production dramatically. With the loss of the Eternal Sphere, our revenue has gone right down. We're currently working on more things like this, like your garden, to help people relax."

"How nice of you to keep me informed."

She finally looked at him then.

"Luther…"

Maybe she was going to hug him. Something in his eyes told her not to.

"I want to see the reports."

"Which ones?"

"All of them. Cashflow and projects."

She looked at him, thinking about it. His sheer impotence in this situation made him furious. It was _his_ company, and now he had to let someone else decide how much he could be involved in it. Blair had always been like this – a controlling big sister, who'd take his toys away before he was done with them. Because she thought he'd hurt himself, or that he should concentrate on something else, or simply because she thought she knew better. She always thought she knew better. And right now, he couldn't even stand up, or walk away. He just had to sit here and take it.


	9. Chapter 9

The next time Maria came to the hospital, it was night. Luther wasn't asleep – he rarely slept at night any more. He preferred to sleep during the day. People bugged him less that way.

His arms were out of the casts now, although his legs wouldn't be good for quite a bit longer. He sat propped up, drawing on a small tablet. Maria didn't recognise it – it looked like those etch-a-sketch toys Terran children still played with sometimes, only far sleeker. Luther drew with a piece of pen-shaped plastic, occasionally using the buttons at the side of the contraption to turn his design through the three dimensions he drew in.

"What are you drawing?" She asked him. He ignored her question.

"You have pornography in the Eternal Sphere, right?"

"...yes," she replied, wondering where he was going with this.

He grinned. It wasn't a pleasant expression. There was something twisted in it. "I thought you might. We didn't design any, but, as you know, the Eternal Sphere managed to surprise us a few times."

Maria didn't reply.

"Sphere makes other things besides the Eternal Sphere," he continued. "We designed those windows, and the hospital gardens. And we make a program called Escort." He grinned again. "It's a program for lonely people to make companions. They look like whatever their owners, want, and do whatever their owners want."

She didn't like the way he was looking at her. "What's your point, Luther?"

"What makes you any different from those?"

She glared at him. "I have a mind of my own, Luther. I'm not just one of your creations."

He laughed. Like the grin, it was bitter, twisted somehow. "But you are, Maria my dear. That's exactly what you are!"

"I'm leaving, Luther," she warned him.

He laughed again, more manically. "Go!" He said. "I can make as many of you as I like! You're just a program! You're just data!"


	10. Chapter 10

Alone in Gemity, Maria thought about going home. She had no goals here, beyond annoying Luther. She didn't know what she'd expected from getting to know him.

It had been all she could think about, afterwards. 4D space, and what its existence meant for her. Everything seemed utterly pointless, when she knew that there was another world out there. So, she'd come here, and found the creator. She'd felt an overwhelming desire to understand him, as something other than opposition, as her creator.

Now, she just wanted to go home.

She couldn't do it by herself. She'd need Sophia. She'd need to find a way into the Eternal Sphere to contact her.

Maria turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. She wondered how hard it would be to break into Sphere again, and, even if she did, whether she'd be able to find anything to help her.


End file.
